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Oil at Heart of Dispute Over Iran

PARIS — Thirty-one years ago this week — Jan. 16, 1979 — the shah of Iran flew into exile, opening the way to the birth of an Islamic republic and, over time, a country whose leaders have shaken much of world with their apocalyptic threats and drive for nuclear weapons.

For sure, demonstrations, shootings and massive repression brought a picture of chaos and revolution to Tehran and had left Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s Peacock Throne tottering. But it was a series of strikes, virtually shutting down Iran’s oil fields, imposing rationing on gas, and raising the prospect of shortages of heating oil, that really signaled the shah’s end.

In the space of five days from Dec. 23, 1978, after two months of off-and-on strikes, murders and intimidation in Iran’s oil fields, production fell from 6.5 million barrels a day earlier in the month to roughly 700,000, stopping exports and providing just enough supply to cover national consumption.

On Dec. 28, rationing went into effect at gas stations, the Central Bank shut down, and oil field workers, endorsing tactics approved by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from Neauphle-le-Château, outside Paris, pledged not to go back to their jobs until the shah was gone.

The availability of oil and the oil field strikes had become the issue and the endgame. On Feb. 1, the ayatollah, as if apotheosized, returned home triumphantly from France to joy and subsequent years of then-unimagined absolute power and ruthless change. During some of those pivotal moments, I was in Tehran or Neauphle, reporting for The New York Times.

All these years later, we’re back to oil as one of history’s Big Levers concerning Iran. The circumstances have changed vastly from 1979 and now involve an Islamic fundamentalist regime at the threshold of nuclear arms. Oil looms again, this time looking like the West’s possible — but only partially used — best shot to head off the nukes.

The background: Since 2006, three separate sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions have largely failed to hold back the mullahs’ nuclear program. Through these years, the United States, France and Britain held in reserve a what-we’ll-do-when-things-get-serious plan of sanctions meant to target Iran’s dependency on the refined petroleum products from abroad that provide about 40 percent of its gasoline needs.

Serious was supposed to have started Jan. 1. That was when the Americans said time would run out for Iran to respond positively to an international plan that would have effectively slowed the Iranian nuclear program.

But over the past weeks it has become clear that the sanctions on gasoline aren’t going to happen — either at the United Nations because the Chinese and Russians don’t want them, or in an ad hoc alliance that would include the European Union. One European-based mercantile explanation: third-country suppliers would take advantage of those restrained by a ban.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton may have thought this was an argument of insufficient warmth or weight at a time when Iranian demonstrators were being murdered. She has said she preferred sanctions that would work “without contributing to the suffering of ordinary” Iranians.

That meant the prime target — seemingly to keep the West from looking self-involved and heartless — would be the business and personal interests of the Revolutionary Guards, a fairly invulnerable pillar of the Tehran regime.

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French diplomats, according to Le Monde, without referring to Mrs. Clinton, said concerns like those she expressed “are exaggerated or baseless.” Rather, the newspaper reported they consider that “the breakdown between the regime and the people appears to be such that putting the country under pressure in relation to its nuclear program would be not be sufficient to result in a burst of nationalist unity.”

Thérèse Delpech, director of strategic affairs for the French Atomic Energy Commission, who has been talking publicly since 2007 about the feasibility of sanctions to limit Iran’s imports of refined petroleum products, saw a generalized lack of resolve to deal with Iran.

“It’s not the right time to irritate China,” she said. “It’s not the right time to aggravate China and Russia. It’s not the right time to upset the Iranian people. And finally, you hear the Iranian people can take care of things themselves.”

“This represents a series of retreats. It’s a philosophy of nonaction.”

France has talked about other new sanctions that could hinder the sale of petroleum industry equipment and technology to Iran, but it has hardly challenged steps backing away from the sanctions involving gasoline it once believed would work.

All the same, the strongest contradictions involve the United States.

On the international scene, the Obama administration’s “no” to trying to rally its friends to oil-related sanctions just might be interpreted as giving tacit support to the very questionable idea that if the West waits long enough, a new regime will nullify the mullahs’ nuclear threat.

(For the contrary case, read Mir Hussein Moussavi’s rejection of the latest international offer of talks, or President Barack Obama’s description of differences so limited between Mr. Moussavi, the Iranian opposition’s candidate in last June’s disputed presidential elections, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that “either way we are going to be dealing with a regime that’s hostile to the United States.”)

Embarrassingly, and very publicly, the foreign policy fade comes just as the U.S. Congress is moving toward enacting legislation that will allow Mr. Obama to punish foreign companies that provide Iran with gasoline. The House approved the bill, described as the most direct way to confront the nukes, 412 to 12, in December, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate said it would act on it this month.

Assuming the bill passes, it would represent but a fraction of the potential impact of tightly knit international sanctions aimed at Iran’s gasoline imports.

Thirty-one years after the shah’s departure, the mullahs’ existential vulnerabilities include the oil-related one central to his giving way. While no sanctions may be capable of diverting Iran from its ambitions to become a nuclear power, can the allies be certain without trying the toughest among those theoretically on the table?

Of the remaining choices, what’s left in time, outside of the military alternative, is carefully managed ambiguity obscuring the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability, or its outright accommodation. They are dreadful.